The present invention relates to containers for preparing heated aromatic beverages, and especially relates to a container for brewing tea.
It is well known that gourmet coffee houses have become increasingly popular in recent times wherein people may select a specific coffee to enjoy from a variety of coffees having different tastes and aromas. While such varieties of coffees have grown in public acceptance, teas have not experienced a similar surge in popularity, even though varieties of spiced and aromatic teas are widely available. A primary reason teas have not grown with coffees in contemporary popularity is due to inherent limitations of traditional methods and mechanics of brewing tea in America.
Most tea provided to diners is served with a fixed amount of a specific dried tea within a liquid permeable bag in a cup of hot water. In order to control strength of the resulting tea beverage (e.g., the relative concentration of tea solutes and suspended particles in the water solvent), the diner must extract the tea bag after a certain time period. If the bag is left in too long, the tea may be too strong; if taken out too early, the tea may be too weak. The length of time to achieve a desired strength of tea also depends on a temperature of the water in the cup in which the tea is being brewed. The temperature is often an unknown however, and a tea drinker may wait the normal specific time period before removing the bag, only to find the tea beverage is too weak and too cool to properly enjoy.
An alternative method of brewing tea eliminates some of those problems by providing a teapot wherein the relative amount of tea and hot water may be varied to achieve a desired strength and the teapot keeps the tea warmer during brewing than would an open cup. However, teapots typically provide a greater volume of tea than can be enjoyed by a single diner, and are therefore too costly to satisfy selective tastes of individual connoisseurs of heated beverages. Small teapots appropriate for a single diner are similarly prohibitively costly requiring both a teapot and a separate cup for one user, in contrast to a single cup required for a gourmet coffee drinker.
Another tea-brewing alternative is to encase a specific amount of tea in a finely screened tea ball or hollow container that may be immersed in a cup of hot water. When the tea beverage achieves a satisfactory strength, the tea ball is removed. While such a device overcomes limitations of a paper or cloth tea bag by enabling a user to vary the amount of tea used for a cup of water, such tea balls are typically metal and can slightly alter the resulting tea flavor (unless fabricated of expensive precious metals); are costly to manufacture; must be meticulously cleaned; and are highly conductive of heat, tending to cool the beverage. Moreover, using a tea ball to custom brew a cup of tea would require a user to manipulate the ball with her or his hands in order to insert the selected tea leaves into the ball, again jeopardizing the resulting flavor with contaminants from the user's hands.
Many European connoisseurs of tea have observed that optimum tea flavor is achieved by teapots that permit dry tea leaves to be freely dispersed within a hot water solvent for a specific amount of time, thereby avoiding localized areas of excessively high concentrations of tea solutes or suspended particles that ultimately diminish the overall flavor of the resulting tea beverage. It is theorized that freely dispersed tea leaves experience uniform temperature transitions that enhance uniform dissolving of tea solutes for enhanced flavor and aroma, in contrast to concentrated tea quantities in a bag or tea ball, wherein tea leaves at an exterior layer of the concentrated tea quantity necessarily experience a different temperature transition upon exposure to hot water than do tea leaves located at a central area of the concentrated tea quantity. In use of teapots with freely dispersed tea leaves, when a desired strength of the tea beverage is achieved, the tea leaves are screened out of the beverage as it is poured into a cup for the tea drinker. Use of the metal tea ball or any bagged tea in known teapots or cups cannot achieve such a delicate relationship between the tea and brewing water as do freely dispersed tea leaves in the brewing water. However, it is necessary with known tea brewing methods and containers to use both a teapot, a screen and a cup to produce such a high quality tea beverage.
A contemporary gourmet coffee house environment invites connoisseurs of heated beverages to savor their special drink in an unhurried, relaxing fashion. Because of the above described limitations of conventional methods and containers for brewing tea, it is not practical to custom brew an individual cup of tea so that the resulting tea beverage has a consistent flavor that is a specific flavor sought by an individual tea drinker.
Accordingly, it is a general object of the present invention to provide a tea brewing and drinking container that overcomes cost and quality problems of the prior art.
It is a more specific object to provide a tea brewing and drinking container that enables a user to select a specific amount of selected, dried tea leaves for each cup of tea to be brewed.
It is yet another specific object to provide a tea brewing and drinking container that permits tea leaves to be freely dispersed throughout heated brewing water while the tea is being brewed.
It is a further object to provide a tea brewing and drinking container that enables a user to comfortably drink the brewed tea beverage from the brewing container without first removing the tea leaves from the container.
These and other objects and advantages of this invention will become more readily apparent when the following description is read in conjunction with the accompanying drawings.